discipline. So steam ahead and don't mind me."

The others accepted my decision without comment; most of them were so
miserable that they did not care which way we went, also they were good
enough to repose confidence in my judgment.

"Doubtless the Baas has reasons," said Hans dubiously, "although the
spoor, when last we saw it, headed towards the rising sun and as the
country is all the same, I do not see why those man-eaters should have
returned."

"Yes," I said, "I have reasons," although in fact I had none at all.

Hans surveyed me with a watery eye as though waiting for me to explain
them, but I looked haughty and declined to oblige.

"The Baas has reasons," continued Hans, "for taking us on what I think
to be the wrong side of that great ridge, there to hunt for the spoor of
the men-eaters, and they are so deep down in his mind that he cannot
dig them up for poor old Hans to look at. Well, the Baas wears the Great
Medicine and perhaps it is there that the reasons sit. Those Strathmuir
fellows say that they can go no further and wish to die. Umslopogaas
has just gone to them with his axe to tell them that he is ready to help
them to their wish. Look, he has got there, for they are coming quickly,
who after all prefer to live."

Well, we started for my white patch of stones which no one else had
noticed and of which I said nothing to anyone, and reached it by the
following evening, to find, as I expected, that it was a lime outcrop.

By now we were in a poor way, for we had practically nothing left to
eat, which did not tend to raise the spirits of the party. Also that
lime outcrop proved to be an uninteresting spot overlooking a wide
valley which seemed to suggest that there were other valleys of a
similar sort beyond it, and nothing more.

Captain Robertson sat stern-faced and despondent at a distance muttering
into his beard, as had become a habit with him. Umslopogaas leaned upon
his axe and contemplated the heavens, also occasionally the Strathmuir
men who cowered beneath his eye. The Zulus squatted about sharing such
snuff as remained to them in economic pinches. Goroko, the witch-doctor,
engaged himself in consulting his "Spirit," by means of bone-throwing,
upon the humble subject of whether or no we should succeed in killing
any game for food to-morrow, a point on which I gathered that his
"Spirit" was quite uncertain. In short, the gloom was deep and universal
and the sky looked as though it were